Maddie’s® Insights is our ongoing webcast series with practical tips based on current research to help pets and people. Join us in March for a webinar on how early-life stress affects rescue kittens’ behavior and health. Our speaker is Dr. Jennifer Vernick, a veterinary behavioral medicine resident at Atlantic Veterinary College, UPEI in Canada.
Across species, early-life stressors, such as inadequate nutrition, maternal separation, unreliable access to shelter, threats/abuse, and disease, profoundly affect brain development and behavior. Research has shown these stressors can impair cognitive, emotional, and social functions as well as alter the body’s stress response systems, particularly the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis. In kittens specifically, early nutritional stress and maternal separation have been linked to learning deficits, abnormal fear responses, increased aggression, and altered play behavior.
At the end of this webinar, you will:
- be able to identify several different examples of early life stressors
- understand why hair cortisol concentration (HCC) may be useful to measure
- be able to provide potential reasons for high and low HCC
- understand why relative telomere length (RTL) is measured
- be able to provide potential causes for shortened telomeres
- be able to provide examples of how early life stressors were associated with the behaviours that rescue kittens displayed during testing
Earn continuing education credit from The Association for Animal Welfare Advancement towards 1.0 CAWA CEs. This webinar has also been pre-approved for 1.0 continuing education credits by the National Animal Care & Control Association (NACA). It has also been submitted for 1 hour of continuing education credit in jurisdictions which recognize RACE approval for on-demand viewers. We will post the recording on Maddie’s University a day or so after the live webcast.
Guest Speaker:
Jennifer Vernick, BA, DVM
Behavioural Medicine Resident
Atlantic Veterinary College, UPEI
REGISTER: https://maddies.fund/MIwebcastsRegister
